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The Most Common Themes In Our Bad Dreams And Nightmares

Despite their scary reputation, fear is actually not the main emotion elicited in many nightmares and bad dreams, according to The Huffington Post.

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Just a little more than one-third of nightmares and more than half of bad dreams elicited primary emotions other than fear, found researchers from the University of Montreal. Instead, feelings of confusion, disgust, sadness and guilt are common in these types of dreams, the research showed.

The study, published in the journal SLEEP, involved analysis of 431 bad dreams and 253 nightmares from 331 people, mostly women. The study participants kept a dream journal for two to five weeks, where they described their dreams just after waking up. The average entry was 144 words, though some entries were shorter (just a couple lines) and some were longer (more than a page), the Huffington Post reports.